Tonight’s release is live!

We’re happy to announce that tonight’s release — last blogged about here — is live on your social network! A few highlights of this release:

The ability to create multiple levels of administrators

New icons across your social network that match your theme

Expanded email notification and birthday settings

Additionally, your social network’s Latest Activity feed is getting a new-and-improved look and feel. We’ll be rolling out this feature to your social network over the next week. We’ll keep you updated regularly about the status of this rollout on the Ning Status blog.

If you have any questions about tonight’s release, please contact us via the Ning Help Center.

UPDATE (Feb. 11): Thanks for the great feedback on the new Latest Activity feature. We really appreciate it!

We are adding back in links to replies and comments as well as replacing the display of actual profile comments in the feed with links to the profile comments themselves. We will also add back in the separators between items for easier scan-ability today.

As for the member photos, we will be relaunching them as rollovers in an upcoming release.

Lastly, for those of you who hate the new icons, we’re listening to your feedback, however we’d also love to ask that you live with them for a few weeks first and then let us know what you think. It’s definitely a change from what is there now, however we also believe in the end that it will make the feature much more dynamic and compelling. We appreciate your patience on it and keep the feedback coming. Thanks!

I noticed I just have to sign out on one Ning.site and I am signed out of all the ning.com sites.

Is there a way of changing the “Sign In” feature so we don’t have to enter our email and pw in every site? I belong to 40(+-) sites and to enter my email and pw sure slows things down.

What I was thinking is, we sign into Ning.com once (for the day) then on every Ning site that we are a member all we have to do is hit a button, like maybe have the Ning ID Icon on the Sign In and it automatically uses our “Ning ID” and signs us in? Like what google and yahoo have. Sign in once and it automatically has me signed in on all their sites. Just thinking of convenience for my members. I have 4 ning sites networked together.

Hey Guy – The reason we don’t have the single sign-on at this point is for performance. We actually had it early on and removed it to speed up page loads. We are exploring ways to bring this back in a way that makes sense and keep things fast. Thanks!

In my network, we have the latest activity in the right column. Thus, the partial text preview does not appear which is understandable. However, it seems to be much less graphically appealing with the small icons instead of the profile photos. Also, the font is too small. It just doesn

I set my activity count to “zero” temporarily and when I was ready to reset it to 20, the “edit” button and the entire Activity section disappeared from my main page… I see it in feature updates page, but cannot see Activities on main page…. strange…

I like most of the new updates. However, I’m not sure how I feel about the Latest Activity Changes. If the Latest Activity is in the center column, the partial text for blog posts, discussions, and comments does make it very easy to scan without going to another page. However, there now seems to be no way to click a link in the latest activity to take you right to the comment you started reading. It seems like “commented on” in the latest activity should be/was that link.

In my network, we have the latest activity in the left column. Thus, the partial text preview does not appear which is understandable. However, it seems to be much less graphically appealing with the small icons instead of the profile photos. Also, the font is too small. It just doesn’t look right. Any chance of increasing the font and allowing an option to use the profile photos instead of icons when the activity is not in the center column?

That’s a great question. In fact, we totally hear on this point. And that’s why we’ve designed Multiple Levels of Administrators with your suggestion in mind. If you create an administrative role with the ability to control the Members feature, anyone who you appoint to that role will not be able to view email addresses on the Manage>Members page and cannot export the .csv list of your members, with their email addresses.

Hi Evan, how can we make someone an admin, without letting them see the thousands of email addresses of our members. That problem is why we do not have admins. We really do not someone setting up a competing network, and inviting all 3,7000 members to come join it. We have had 3 members doing this with their hundreds of “friends”. We had to ban the offending members, who were trying to undermine a years worth of work getting members. Thx Jim

But
Where went the icon on the top near my name telling me about inncomming mails and alerts?

A Wish for future updates:
Give us more tools and posibilities to give creators of the supgroups better possiblities to design their group themselves – e.g. more RSS than one – text-options – own calender?

But, I think what Ning should before anything else is adding a better visual editor for the bloggers.
You see, most of the members of the networks are not familiar with HTMl and when I give them scripts to make their blog-posts the way they want, they get confuse, find it difficult and of course, ANNOYED!

Ning provides so much great things, a little tweak would have made a big difference.

Thanks for letting me know. Another thing I’d like to see is discussions from groups being shown on the front page – at the moment that doesn’t seem possible either. But I set up a group so that all the members can send a message to the whole group without having to befriend each other. We shifted from yahoogroups and I like how ning works but am still getting used to it.

That’s a great question. In fact, if you’re concerned about email notifications, this release brings some great options to you and your members. There aren’t expanded email notifications, there are now expanded options to control email notifications!

You can now follow a group, but not get an email every time a new member joins that group. And if your member doesn’t like receiving email when a new member they invited joins the network, they can just uncheck the “People that I’ve invited to join this network” option, on their “Email” section on the “Settings” page.

Good about all the changes but expanded email notification? My members hate getting all the notifications of new members but there seems no option to switch that off. Any chance that could be considered?